Members in the Media
From: LA Weekly

Daydreamers Could Be the Smart Kids, Says USC Study

LA Weekly:

Daydreamers used to get in trouble. They were the underachievers. They were the kids who ended up hanging out under the bleachers and smoking stuff that smelled funny. Right?

Wrong.

New research co-authored by USC assistant professor Mary Helen Immordino-Yang suggests that daydreamers …are the smart ones.

A USC paper titled “Rest Is Not Idleness,” published in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science, argues that mental wandering is crucial to healthy brain development.

In fact, disciplining daydreamers in classrooms could be a bad thing. USC:

… Diminishing opportunities for young people to look inward and reflect could have negative effects on their well-being, morality and academic success.

Immordino-Yang says that a young brain at rest is also a mind preparing for, in the words of USC, “attention-demanding tasks afterward.”

Read the whole story: LA Weekly

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Comments

Quite understandable, almost intuitive really, when you take into consideration certain people (Mark Twain, Steve Jobs, George Carlin, just to name a few at complete random) and their tendency to undermine the educational establishment for the simple fact that it tends to trap people inside of a rigid frame of thought. It also reminds me of the ADHD. It’s supposed to be a “disorder” but personally I could never understand why thinking of many things and having a highly active mind is bad thing. Perhaps it’s the sheer monotony and boredom of traditional schooling that makes it seem so disruptive when in actuality it’s a kid’s natural yearning for real, curiosity quenching education, and not mindless rote memory routines.


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